


Where reality lies

by MattTheAceDetective



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Horror, Mild Gore, Multi, Psychological Horror, Unfinished
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 15:02:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18209894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MattTheAceDetective/pseuds/MattTheAceDetective
Summary: All Casey had wanted to do was talk to their Psychology professor, but instead got stranded in a hellish version of his college and a broken ankle. On the bright side, she at least found a cat.





	1. Chapter 1

Ugh, this blows. I sat in the library of my college campus, completely and utterly alone, with no wifi or even any service. Of course the day I chose to stay over to discuss something I was having problems with with my psychology professor was the one day Ohio got an unbearable amount of snow, paired with 10 mile winds and subzero temperatures. Turns out, that teacher had already left by the time I reached their room. Well, guess the idea of heading back to my apartment wouldn’t be happening anytime soon. I realized that the moment I looked out the window, and made the split second decision to head to the library, which was the only heated place in this entire section of the campus. I sighed, resigning myself to the fact that I’d have to resort to the archaic past time of reading. Don't get me wrong, I love reading, but it just so happens I had an entire essay due soon, and was not about to write that out. I sighed, pushing my chair away from the table I sat at. I stood, gazing at the library with bookshelves that covered almost of the 10 foot walls. I glanced at the signs for help, before remembering I hadn’t put on my contacts in this morning, and my glasses were in my other bag, back at the apartment. I sagged, and decided to just walk through every bookshelf until I found something that seemed even remotely interesting. I felt like I was being watched, but everyone else either is home already, or made it to their dorms. I would’ve been with them, had it not been for the fact my dorm was literally on the opposite side of the campus, which was at least a few miles away. Ah, now I remember why I bought my own apartment instead of living in my dorm. Besides, I couldn’t even remember which dorm was mine, and I doubt people would appreciate me knocking on their dorm doors at 10 at night. Honestly, this is actually kind of nice. At least I don't have to deal with the idiots I call classmates. I sighed, grabbing a book that caught my interest. It was bound by tarnished black leather, and the title had been rubbed away by years of hands prying open the covers, trying to discover the books secrets. I opened the book up, and was met with nothing. I furrowed my brow in confusion as before my eyes words appeared as if being written. I looked around to see if this had perhaps been a joke, or even just a trick of the light, but no one was here, and the lighting had remained the same. I felt an undeniable chill race up my spine, freezing me to my core. I took a glance at the book again, only to see the pages completely filled. I flipped through them with eager curiosity, reading a few words aloud.  
“I call on thee  
Spirit of the night  
And pray you tell me  
What I will hear in this light”  
With no warning, all the lights went out, leaving only the sound of my heavy breathing, and the imprint of the words I had spoken. The lights didn’t shatter, but I still had no light, which is less than ideal. With a final heavy sigh, and weary glance at the book I held in my hands, I trekked out into the hallway, hoping to find either a flashlight or a generator. There wasn’t a soul in the hallway, and even fewer lights. It was a mess trying to figure out where I was going. I just wandered around the campus, waiting for something, anything, to happen. I swore I heard a rush of air beside me, but when I turned, no one was there. I’d like to say I shrugged it off and pushed it to the back of my mind, and part of me did, but the other part warned me to be cautious, watch where I was walking, make sure no one else was around. I walked slow, and made as little noise as possible. I’m not sure why I was so paranoid, realistically it was probably just a draft from a nearby window, but that thought did nothing to quell my ever rising anxiety. I turned the corner, and I swear there was something just out of the line of sight, taunting me, but when I turned to face it, I was met with nothing but a wall staring at me, making me question my own sanity. I continued, eventually finding a bathroom, a faint light flickering through the crack in the door. I had a bad feeling, something in the pit of my stomach warning me not to continue, to just turn back and pretend I never saw anything, but I ignored it, and pushed open the door, which creaked and groaned like an old man's bones. The first thing to hit me was the smell. It smelled as if some type of meat was rotting, and had been for a while. I discovered the cause of that smell when I glanced up to the ceiling above one of the stalls. The flickering light wasn’t actually flickering, it was caused by a body hung by a rope from the neck swinging back and forth, like some twisted pendulum. The body seemed to be female, but the face was so bloated and pale it was almost impossible to tell with absolute certainty. It didn’t surprise me that this person had yet to be found, no one ever comes down this way unless necessary, but what did surprise me was the shape it was in. It had cuts all along its body, some still dripping blood. There was no way someone had done this to themself. It seemed as if some one had done this on purpose, and tried to frame it as a suicide. On the wall behind the body, written in blood, were the very words I had spoken an hour prior to all this, but wrong, mixed up, as if someone was answering to them  
“ You call on me  
The Spirit of the night  
And prayed I tell you  
What you will hear in this light  
Listen and heed my voice  
Tonight you will be faced with choice  
The clues are left scattered  
Like ashes in the wind  
Now you know the rules  
Let the games begin”  
My blood ran cold, and my mind was racing. Let the games begin, what? What did any of that mean? I left the room, feeling sick. Everything was spinning, and I kept falling to my knees. I feel three times before I couldn’t get up. My vision slowly faded, but I swore I saw that same hulking black shadow, looming over me with a sick grin, right before I passed out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here's the first chapter. I'll try to update every Friday, but I'm horrible with deadlines. Hope you enjoyed!


	2. Chapter 2

I finally came to, but everything was wrong. Everything was dark red, like drying blood, and the school itself was decaying, leaving nothing but structurally unsound walls and crumbling ceilings. I stood on unsteady feet, and tried to grab at the wall, only for it to crumble like sand in my hands. I managed to catch myself, but only just. I kept telling myself that logically this wasn’t real, it was just a hallucination or something, but everything was so real. I felt the walls crumbling when I touched them, I smelled the decaying of the woods surrounding the campus. I knew, that whatever this was, it was real, even if on a different plane of reality, and that I had to play whatever this ‘game’ was. I decided to look around, look for these ‘clues’ that that...entity, had written. I walked for 5 minutes before I found the first clue. It was a piece of paper, a bright contrast from the rest of the world despite the yellowing of the paper. I read it, growing more confused with every word. It was in binary. Glad I took game design. 

“01010010 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101100 01100101 01100110 01110100 00100000 01101101 01100001 01110010 01101011 01110011 0001010 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101101 01100001 01110010 01101011 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101011 01101001 01101110 0001010 01100110 01101001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100101 01110011 0001010 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101110 0001010 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101110 01100001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101000 01101001 01100100 01100100 01100101 01101110 0001010 01101001 01110100 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01110010 01100101 01110110 01100101 01100001 01101100 01100101 01100100 0001010 01110111 01101000 01100101 01101110 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101100 01100001 01111001 01100101 01110010 01110011 0001010 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01110000 01100101 01100101 01101100 01100101 01100100”

It took me a while, but I eventually decoded the message. It read:   
“Red left marks

it marks the skin

find the lines

and you will win

the name is hidden

it will be revealed

when all the layers

have been peeled”

What? I took a step back, trying to rationalize what I just read. ‘It marks the skin’ could that be a reference to the land? Maybe, but probably not. Layers being peeled might be a reference to alternate planes of reality, which was what I suspected all along. The real question was, how do I switch between realities? I looked around, spotting something sticking out of the ground slightly, as if someone had dug a hole and half heartedly covered it back up. I dug into the earth, and found a container of pills. They were labeled Hexadrocitine. I figured this was how to flip realities, but I wasn’t sure. I took one, knowing that even if I died it would be more favorable to being stuck in this reality. I closed my eyes and hoped for the best. I opened my eyes, and I was back where I started, back at the campus as it normally was, minus the lights. This is starting to feel like a bad horror story. Well, at least I know how to switch between worlds. I decided to explore this area a little bit, mainly because I was not ready to face whatever face me on the negative layer of existence. I wandered around the seemingly endless dark hallways, watching my back, waiting for something to jump out around the corner, dragging me down to the depths of the underworld where I would spend the rest of eternity. I swore I felt the heat of hellfire burning my body. I shivered at the thought, and kept moving.

I walked for several minutes before I managed to stumble into the boiler room, where the generator was located. I grinned, flipping the switch to the machine. It shuttered and groaned, but eventually turned on with a hiss akin to a dying cat. It became apparent when I traveled back into the hallway that not all the lights in the school were hooked up to the generator. There were very few lights on, and the ones that were cast a very small amount of light, but I told myself it was better than no light at all, forcing myself to ignore the strange way the shadows moved, or rather the odd stillness of them. No matter how many times I walked past the walls, very few shadows seemed to move in a realistic way, always in a sporadic shift or complete stillness. I closed my eyes, and willed those thoughts out of my head. There was nothing out of the ordinary, not really, it was all just my imagination. Tricks of the light, playing into the anxiety embedded in my brain. I opened my eyes again, and continued moving forward. I sighed, or rather hissed, upon realizing that I needed to flip to the negative space again. I swallowed the pills, grimacing at the chalky flavoring, wishing I had something to wash it down with. I shut my eyes, and upon opening them again, realized that I had reached the negative space. Everything still felt wrong, but it felt a little more sound. I glanced around, before deciding to explore this little area. I discovered that while I was in the negative space, I could only explore what I had while on the ‘normal’ side of reality. Normal really isn’t the right word, not really. Nothing has ever really been a conventional normal for me. As a child, I saw shadows of the past. I really shouldn’t call them ghosts, because they didn’t necessarily always show themselves. I felt them surrounding me at all times, and on more than one occasion woke up to orbs with vaguely human forms stare at me from across the room. I tried telling people about it, but I was always told it was normal, that it was just my overactive imagination. As I got older, I learned to keep those things to myself. Once I turned 13, things went from seeing vague orbs hovering above people to seeing full blown visions of the future. Well, let me rephrase that, I saw possible outcomes of the future. I could typically see whether or not  these outcomes were preventable, but it wasn’t entirely accurate. Then, when I finally thought that I could just have a normal life, go to college, get a job, and all that, this happens. I had everything planned out, but this whole event has completely torn any hope of things returning to what they were. 

 

I shook myself out of my thoughts, realizing I hadn’t been moving for the past few minutes. I glanced around, noticing that what would’ve been the steps leading down to the first floor were crumbling. I tried to calculate the risks and factors in my mind, before deciding that it wasn’t that much of a fall if the stairs do crumble under my weight. No surprise, they did. Also unsurprisingly, my calculations (or lack thereof) were incorrect. The second I fell, I heard a sickening crack come from my left ankle, and I was on the ground in unimaginable pain. I forced out a breathed laugh that held no humour as I remember that this was the same ankle I had broken three years ago, in a very similar fashion. I was 17, and had missed my alarm yet again. I knew I couldn’t risk another unexcused tardy, so I rushed down the stairs in a blind flurry of motions. I had worn my pants a lot longer and baggier back then, so in my furious rush, I managed to overlook the fact that my ankle had become stuck in the obnoxiously long leg of my jeans. I went crashing, and managed to land on my feet. Bad thing about that was, I landed on one foot after 10 seconds of continuous momentum from the top of the stairs. The second my foot made contact with the ground I was howling in pain, my makeup running from the tears running steady tracks on my face. My mother came into the room faster than humanly possible, and once she saw the state I was in, she rushed my to the hospital. I hadn’t broken, sprained, or twisted anything other than the left ankle, and even those were just some fractures. I had to wear a boot and crutches for 6 weeks before my foot healed, and even then it was iffy whether or not it was completely healed. I knew without even having to look down that whatever had happened this time was gonna be a lot more than a few small fractures. I grit my teeth in pain, and sat up, looking around to see what I might be able to use as a makeshift splint with. I obviously could use the stairs for the wood, but it would be far, far to rotted to support anything, the fact that I’m in this situation proving that fact. I glanced around, and saw a piece of fairly sturdy looking wood about three feet away from where I was. I grit my teeth, and pulled myself over to it, forcing my thoughts to stay away from the nausea and pain consuming me, and willed away the black dots that danced and spread across the edges of my vision. After what felt like an eternity I made it over to the wood, grateful to see that there was also a spool of rope, medical tape, and what I assumed to be sedatives, hidden beneath the wood in an olive green bag. There was nothing to cut the rope with, but I was pretty sure I had my pocket knife on me. I dug around the pockets of my faded ripped jeans, hoping to feel something there that would help me. When that search became fruitless, I checked the pockets of my army green bomber jacket, grinning to myself when I felt my hand come in contact with the cool metal. I began to model the splint, hoping to every planet and star in all the universes that I wouldn’t pass out before I finished securing my leg. I didn't, luckily, but I did flip back to my reality, where I promptly collapsed into a pain and shock induced sleep. 

I woke up with a start and sat bolt upright. Good news, what had woken me was nothing more than a black and grey cat. Bad news, I forgot my ankle was broken, and was met with realization swiftly. I groaned, remembering that I had some advil or something of the sort in my pocket; I uncapped the lid, being forced to swallow the pills dry. They weren’t good by any means, but they were significantly better than the Hexadrocitine pills. I think I’m just gonna call them Hex pills. Hexadrocitine is too hard to pronounce. The cat nudged itself up against my leg. I knew that this cat probably wouldn’t leave me alone, so I decided to name them. I took a quick glance at the cat to check the gender. Female. I decided Sai, short for Salem. I finally took a moment to glance at the room around me, and I noticed a set of identical lines spreading out across the room, crossing in the centre. Of course! Ley lines! That's what the riddle had meant by ‘find the lines and you will win,’ I have to find all the ley lines! I assumed more and more would appear as I uncovered more. I decided to spend more time deciphering the riddle that had been left for me. I obviously had to find the name of this entity that kept me trapped here, and I assumed that was what would happen once all the ley lines had been found. 

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here's the first chapter. I'll try to update every Friday, but I'm horrible with deadlines. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
